The goal of bentoctl is to provide an easy-to-use yet flexible tool that can be used used to deploy a bento into the cloud. Bentoctl performs two basic operations:
- bentoctl builds deployable bento images based on the cloud service's requirements.
- bentoctl creates and manages cloud service deployment with Terraform
Operators are plugins that interact with cloud services, such as AWS Lambda and SageMaker. It abstracts the specific implementation details of the cloud service and provides a unified interface for bentoctl. The operator provides 3 core functionality:
- Creates a deployable image based on the cloud service's requirements.
- Manages the container registries provided by the cloud service.
- Generates Terraform projects based on the deployment configuration.
The operator also provides a set of schema that bentoctl uses to validate the deployment configuration. Operators page offers more details on supported platforms.
The operator is designed to be extensible. Users can customize the operator behaviors by forking an existing operators or creating a brand new operator based on the operator template on Github. The customized operators can be installed from a file path and used with bentoctl.
bentoctl uses deployment configuration to specify the deployment properties. The deployment configuration is stored in the local system as a YAML file.
Here is a sample deployment config for the EC2 operator.
1:- api_version specifies the deployment configuration version.
2:- name Deployment's name. bentoctl recommends keeping the deployment name unique within each operator to avoid potential issues.
3:- operator.name - The name of the operator used for deployment, see the list of official operatos supported. If the operator is not already installed, it will be installed automatically based on the version provided. You can also provide a path to the operator if it is in the local directory.
4:- operator.version (optional) - The version of the operator to use. The default is to use the latest.
5:- template The template for the deployment. It determines what the generated terraform project will look like.
6:- spec specifics the deployment details. The deployment detail options are provided by the operator listed.
Bentoctl uses terraform to define the infrastructure and create the various components that are required. Terraform is a mature and popular infrastructure as code (IaC) solution. There were a few reasons why we choose Terraform.
- Terraform has a huge collection of providers (plugins for cloud providers) that bentoctl operators can leverage. With this, you can write custom operators that can deploy to any cloud service that has a provider in the terraform registry. Terraform providers are also maintained and constantly updated with the latest offerings and features that the cloud service providers add.
- Terraform is widely used and there are more resources available. This is helpful when looking to extend the generated files to your specific needs.
- It also gives a unified language and way to specify various cloud components across the different cloud services SaaS solutions out there. This makes building and maintaining operators and adding more cloud service-specific features easier.
Bentoctl generates the terraform files for the cloud service and is designed to be modified if need be to meet to deployment requirements of each team.